Endowment Official Hits Campus ‘McCarthyism’

When Lynne V. Cheney, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, had to step up onto a box so she could reach the microphone in front of her, she at first described herself as “short.” Then she offered this tongue-in-cheek apology: “We don’t say ‘short’--we say ‘vertically challenged.’ ”

Though Cheney was joking about her size during a Tuesday speech before the Los Angeles Music Center’s Blue Ribbon fund-raising group at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, she was illustrating a larger point: that today’s widespread effort to be “politically correct” in speech and ideas may lead to a silencing of opinions that do not fit the “p.c.” mold.

“It’s the new McCarthyism--and I don’t think that’s too strong a phrase to use,” Cheney said.

Cheney’s complaint is that too many college faculty members today believe that liberal views are the only “correct” ones and that anyone who bucks the “liberal orthodoxy” is branded as racist or a sexist, among other things. She added that even some liberal faculty members agree.

“There are people, myself among them, who object to making teaching and learning into the handmaidens of politics,” said Cheney, who is married to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and is serving her second term as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent, grant-making agency established by Congress.

Some conservative faculty members, she said, are afraid to speak out on such controversial issues as ethnic studies or sexist language because “it would be suicidal,” or as one educator told her: “I’m getting old and tired and do not want to get fired.”

She said that at a recent Yale University conference one literature professor suggested that “limiting the humanities to the study of humankind was a form of ‘species-ism.’ ” Cheney went on to say that “species-ists” talk about “wild animals” instead of the more politically correct term, “free roaming.”

“Political correctness does invite parody, but there is a serious aspect to it as well,” Cheney told the group. “The point of opposing ‘political correctness’ is not to silence those who advance it, but to open their views to challenge and debate.”

Cheney also cited the example of American literature scholar Alan Gribben of the University of Texas. He questioned the university’s decision to focus English 306--the required freshman composition course--on a textbook called “Racism and Sexism.” The text, said Cheney, defines racism as “something that only white people can be guilty of” and that “sexism is unique to men.” The textbook “goes on to portray the United States as a society so profoundly racist and sexist as to make a mockery of all our notions of liberty and justice,” Cheney said.

Cheney said Gribben was ostracized because he questioned the book’s fairness, and was plagued by hate mail and anonymous phone calls. Eventually, Cheney said, Gribben left the campus for a position at Alabama’s Auburn University.

In a question-and-answer session, an audience member asked Cheney whether the popularity of political correctness might be an attempt to acknowledge the exclusion of minority groups and women from history textbooks--to “swing the pendulum the other way.”

“I think that’s the hope,” Cheney replied. “But I think there’s an obligation to get that pendulum back to center.”